Is essentially that weird kid who just want's to be one of the cool guys, so he does crap that makes him look like an idiot (hence the mascot heads) because the others tell him too, thinking it will be his "ticket in" but it's not. And then he tries to sound cool like the others, but ends up saying something retarded

Ever since he did that creepy old guy at hooters comercial, I find it very hard to take him seriously

Take it easy on Lee guys. Not everyone is going to pick Michigan as well as we are, we are fans and biased. I find him entertaining. He may not be the most accurate game picker out there, but he isn't annoying.

Corso doesn't know shit about our roster and doesn't follow any program closely (maybe he still pays attention to FSU and Indiana). He doesn't research his picks or provide any real justification for them. He's a cartoon character who waits until things happen and then is entertaining about it.

What I don't get is Desmond's prediction. All he's done is rave about how great Brady Hoke is, how much better shape the program is in. Add in that we will be better at virtually every single position on the field next year, and yet he thinks this will all result in one extra win. One more win than a guy who "needed" to get fired. And that is with a much easier schedule than a season ago. I don't understand the disconnect between what he (and many others) say and what they seem to think will happen this year.

Luckily, Desmond (and Kirk) don't know shit. This team is as talented and experienced as any in the conference. People just don't see it because the leap happened all at once (since we played so many young guys the last few years).

I hope you're right, but a lot of people bitched about these guys suggesting 5-6 wins when RR climbed aboard. To assume 8 wins this year is not really lowballing anything. Temper those ambitions, or you may be disappointed...

Every team is as good as the players on that team (and age/experience play a huge role in how good the players are). A team with 20+ returning starters, All-Americans anchoring both lines, a returning All-American at QB, and not a freshman to be found in the starting lineup has pretty damn good players, and certainly isn't a 5 win team. According to Desmond (and virtually everyone else) this team could've/should've won 8 games last year and would have if a guy like Hoke was in charge. Hell, people were on this board yesterday talking about how the 2008 team could've/should've won 7 games if only Rodriguez had called different plays on offense.

To think things like that, and then assume the team won't get loads (or any) better when they lose virtually no production to graduation and have so many talented young guys who are still on the steep part of the learning curve (Roh, Campbell, Lewan, Demens, and even Denard) is either crazy, uninformed, dumb, or just reflects a warped sense of values.

No offense, but you are calling people crazy, uninformed, dumb, etc and yet you are not giving us a prediction of your own.

You state that people said this, so now they should be saying this.

Well that's not how it works, especially when you are talking about people in the media, who are not held accountable for their predictions last week, much less last year.

Maybe Desmond thinks we will win every game and go undefeated, but he doesn't want to come off like Lou or Lee, so he tempers it a little bit on TV.

Or maybe he is blowing smoke when he talks about how good we are, and really thinks it is going to take time to be good again.

All I'm saying is that 8 wins does not seem like a crazy or ridiculous prediction to me.

You claim we have an easier schedule this year, but I think that's debatable.

Also, if you look at our losses from last season, many of them were not close games. So even if we do get better at nearly every position, we could still lose 3+ games.

Football is a strange game where injuries, ball luck, emotion, focus, momentum, etc all play a role in how a game or season plays out.

Personally, I could see this team winning 10 games and I could see them winning 6. So if I had to make a final prediction, I would probably go with 7-8 wins. And I think thats the way a lot of people are looking at this season. If lots of things go right, we can challenge for the BIG. Lots of things go wrong, we could barely make a bowl game.

Assuming relative health, I think this team wins 10+ games this year. I've thought that for quite some time, both before and after the coaching change. As for the schedule, we swap @Indiana for Minnesota (no more difficult), @Penn State for @Northwestern (maybe a little better team, but certainly no powerhouse and less home field advantage), and Wisconsin for Nebraska (I doubt NU is as good as Wisky was last year at 11-2). OSU, MSU, Iowa, and Illinois all lost tons of quality, experienced talent that history indicates they won't be able to immediately replace. None of those teams should be as good as they were last year. And Purdue still sucks.

As for Desmond (or anyone else) thinking this is a 7-8 win team, that is fine on its own. The problem arises when you say one coach sucks for winning seven games and deserves to be fired, but this new coach is the awesomest guy ever and as such he can maybe win one more game with a much better roster. There is a huge disconnect there. I'm a huge Rich Rodriguez fan/believer, but if he had come back and gone 8-4 with this team I would have been ready to pack his bags myself. This isn't just a Desmond thing (and you're right, he would potentially look goofy if his predictions for Michigan were more positive than everyone else). Our entire fanbase seems to assume Greg Robinson eats his own feces while Greg Mattison walks on water. Yet no one seems to expect anything other than the modest improvement one always sees when a team returns so many young defensive starters.

Also, the score of games last year doesn't mean shit. Two years ago we got blown out by Illinois (and three years ago as well). Last year we beat them, even though they had a much better team. I don't get why people keep acting like we'll start the MSU game down a couple touchdowns. We had a 31-12 lead in Columbus in 2000. Then we lost 9 of the next 10 games against OSU. The past doesn't matter.

I completely understand what you are saying about the disconnect between expectations between RR's staff and the new one.

However, I think the fact that we changed coaches is a factor in tempering expecations. Of course people expect Mattison to be infinitely better than GERG. But it is still a new system and it is still the same kids who did not play very well last season. I think this defense will be improved, but by how much remains to be seen.

I think the biggest part of the tempered expectations stem from the offensive change. No one really knows what this team is going to look like offensively, and those unknowns lead to conservative predictions.

And I think that you are completely wrong when you say that the past doesn't matter. You may be right that the score differential in individual games doesn't translate to the following season. But when looking at the season as a whole, it is very telling IMO.

The bottom line is that almost all of our wins last season were close, while our losses were significantly less competitive. We squeked by some pretty averagew teams while struggling with the good ones. To me that indicates that we were pretty far from being a 10+ win team.

On the other hand, I would feel a lot differently if we had blown out the bad teams and narrowly lost to the top tier of the BT.

People claim that MSU got pretty luck last season (barely beating some average opponents) and are therefore predicting a return to 7-8 wins. I agree with that. I also think that Michigan will be much improved this season. But I also think that improvement might only produce 1-2 more wins because of how far we have to go to compete with the top 3 in the conference.

And just let me wrap up this extremely long post by saying that I hope I am totally wrong about how far we have to go. I hope the light turns on and we shock the world. I think we have the potential to do it. I am just trying to explain to you why people are only predicting 7-8 wins rather than 10.

2 years ago MSU had a losing record and lost to CMU. Last year they went 11-1 before that Alabama debacle and had all of their toughest games at home. There is no reason we shouldn't have 10 wins this year. We have 8 home games!

easily my favorite commenter at mgoblog besides Brian. I totally agree with every word, except you are able to verbalize it much better than me.

This year's schedule appears to be easier than last year's schedule. This was a 7 win team last season. Based on all I'm hearing, we have upgraded the coaching staff and return 19 of 22 starters. I expect no less than 7 wins this season. In fact, I think 7 wins should disappoint most Michigan fans. And I will be especially disappointed because I have $100 on over 7 wins.

I disagree that M should have won 8 games last year. We probably should have split the ND and Illinois games to finish 6-6. (You could make an argument that the Mass and Indiana games also could have gone the other way, but I don't because the Mass game wasn't as close as the score and M was clearly the better team against Indiana.) I don't agree that the team would have been better with Hoke either. The secondary would have been hopeless in any case and the offense overachieved at least as much as the defense underachieved. I think D Robinson progressed more under RR than he would have under Hoke.

If you start from the premise that last year we were "really" a 6-6 team that caught a few breaks to finish 7-5, then 8-4 indeed looks like a significant step forward. There aren't any unwinnable games on the schedule, but only Western, Eastern, Minn, and Purdue look like relatively easy wins.

I don't think we should have won 8 last year (could have, but didn't). I'm pointing out that when you fire a coach for winning 7 games, you are basically saying you think he should've won at least 8. And even if we had, say, beaten Iowa (and if Avery makes that open field tackle we have a shot), how many people still would have wanted Rodriguez gone if the rest of the season goes the same way (blowouts to OSU, Miss. St. and Wisky)? Yet for some reason despite having the answer to all our coaching woes and a signifciantly improved roster, the expectations aren't any higher.

It's his job to predict, and whether he predicts 5 wins or 13 it doesn't change how the team will play this year. I mean, didn't Brian say on WTKA that 5 wins was more likely than 10 this year or something like that? There is a chance, albeit a small one, that the defense doesn't improve very much and the offense takes a big step back.

And yea, Corso doesn't know as much about this team as most of us do, but I don't think we know as much about Oregon State, Baylor, Virginia or any other random team as he, Herbie, or Desmond do.

Let him make his predictions, I don't think it's out of any sense of bitterness or hate towards Michigan. Remember when Drew Sharp predicted 9 wins before RR's first season?

he is quite often not even coherent. I don't mean he makes lousy arguments, I mean I literally don't understand the words he is saying. I know he had a stroke and that sucks, but why do they keep him on TV? It's hard for me to even watch at times when he can't remember which team or player he was just talking about.

not concerned with Lee Corso or any of his predictions. I do think there's still some unresolved bitterness there from his days at indiana but i have some doubts as to whether that actually plays into his predictions. his predictions often have no rhyme or reason to them and vary week to week on college gameday.

I've been watching college gameday for years and Lee Corso always has negative shit to say say about Michigan. Bitter sour grapes from his days at Indiana I guess but regardless he is a old bitter fool who constantly shits on The Blue. I'm sorry he had a stroke and all but fuck him.

I too was there (sophomore year). The hilarious part is my friend left the stadium disgusted we would only tie Indiana. He missed one of the biggest plays of our generation. As my daughters wold say, "haha."

Corso is entitled to his opinion, but let's not forget that Herbstreit also thought that OSU would win the innaugural B1G championship over Iowa. There might be some contrarion thinking going on set at CFB live.

And to be fair with Corso, he tends to be wrong and openly admits it. If UM struggles out of the gate, there is a chance that 5-6 wins could be the result. Personally, I think they take down ND and are 5-0/4-1 (loss to SDSU) heading into the two-week stretch @NW and @MSU. Leave that 1-1 or 2-0, and this team could easily finish with 8-9 wins.

seems like a dumb pick. I hate the logic that "they play well when nobody expects them to play well." If people are expecting them to be good because nobody is expecting them to be good then where does that leave us?

But OSU winning their division certainly isn't much of a stretch. Whoever wins the Wisco v. OSU game, which is in Columbus, will probably win that division.

The Iowa pick also struck me as more "let me be different" than any logical argument. As for OSU-Wiscy, I agree that the winner of that game will have a jump start on the division championship, but with OSU you are relying on a freshmen with "meh" reports so far from camps (at least what I've read) or a backup QB who looked lost last year the couple of times he had to fill in for Pryor (like against Illinois). I know that OSU is all about defense and ball control, but the losses they've sustained the past year are going to take an effect on the team, and I still think a win over Wiscy won't make them immune to a some slip-ups over the year.

I too found the Iowa pick strange, even more so than OSU. Didn't they lose over half of their starters (incuding Clayborn and Stanzi)? I think Herbie makes much more sense than most of the WWL's "expert" analysts, but that was strange,

As far as Corso goes, he plays the part of the resident buffoon well. Taking him seriously is, well, not very serious behavior.

Good god people, its one commentator who thought Michigan wouldn't do well. Take it easy, we're talking about a game here. You guys are getting way too wound up over this. Life's a lot more fun when you can just say "meh" to items like this. Some people will be high on Michigan this season and some will be down on Michigan. Plus, people on this site tend to over-rate Michigan, because they see all these awesome kids Michigan has, and don't see the development that goes on under other coaching staffs.

To be fair, it's a week before the season starts and one of the most prominent faces in CFB just went on TV and said UM is going to regress by two wins next season despite returning a slew of starters, the defending B1G offensive POY, and some NFL-caliber players on both sides of the ball. When your whole argument against that is "their schedule looks tough," people tend to get worked up. And with Corso, there has always been some residual bitterness with him toward UM - if I could find some of those clips from both 1997 and 2006, you'd see Corso consistently took the negative view of UM in big games throughout those great seasons.

i cannot remember an ann arbor gameday show during my undergrad (and we had many) where the boo-birds didnt drown out his every word.

what drives this feverish hatred? i'd like to introduce into evidence to the mgonation exhibit A, also known as "1997."

“The schedule is too tough for them to have a great year,” said ESPN analyst Lee Corso. “In college football, you’ve got to have margin of error in there…You have to be able to have an off week... Michigan has no chance to have a great football season, in my opinion. They play too many good teams that are as good or better than they are, and a lot of them away from home."

i cannot find the stat, but he went on to pick against us in almost every game on gameday that year.

Gameday was in LA for the SC-UCLA game in 2005. A buddy and I went to the basketball game afterwards and as we came out the Gameday crew was still there doing their late night wrap-up show. We stop for a second to listen and just as we do some dirty homeless dude staggers up next to us, looks over as if he has no idea that a television program is being taped or that Corso has been on TV for years commentating on games, and he just shouts:

"Hey, Corso! What was your fucking record at Indiana!"

Then he just drunkenly staggered off.

I don't have kids, but if I ever do I doubt their births could ever top that moment.

Lee Corso predicted we would not do well this year, and people are up in arms about hit, calling him names, etc.

I have actually seen several people make fun of the stroke he had and the ones he will have in the future.

Granted, I think the guy is past his prime, but when I first got into college football, I loved the guy. He really gave some personality to the pre-game show that the NFL on FOX/CBS/etc guys never could. So I think I will respectfully disagree with Lee on this one and leave it at that.

I don't see what the big deal is. Why should we even care what his prediction is? Predictions are fun to do, but no matter how hard you study this stuff, no one knows what's going to happen for sure. Maybe the D barely improves... maybe they get way better. Maybe Denard struggles in the O... maybe he's just as electric. Corso thinks we're gonna stink, most of us (including myself) don't. We'll see.